The Truman Show (1998)

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Peter Weir’s The Truman Show is a remarkably
layered achievement: a deceptively simple fairy tale; a hilariously
subversive satire of media excess and the erosion of privacy; a sly
exploration of the paranoid, solipsistic fear that the world around one
is somehow staged for one’s benefit and everyone else is in on it; and
finally an elegant parable about truth and happiness with evocative
religious resonances.

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Caveat Spectator

Jim Carrey stretches beyond his usual rubber-faced comedy for a more
meaningful seriocomic role in a Jimmy Stewart mode. He plays Truman
Burbank, a man who begins to question his seemingly idyllic but static
life after a stage light marked “Sirius (9 Canis Major)” crashes to
earth in front of his house one morning.

What Truman doesn’t know is that he’s both the victim of a massive
hoax and the star of an obsessively popular 24-hour TV show — a
prescient blend of “Candid Camera” and the “reality TV” frenzy that hit
about two years after the film. Truman’s whole world is a giant sound
stage, and everyone else — Truman’s wife, his best friend, his
neighbors and coworkers — is acting. Only he is real.

The show is masterminded by “Christof” (Ed Harris), a TV impresario
with a serious God complex (“Cue the sun”) who believes he’s created a
better world for Truman. The imagery of the film’s final act is
suggestive an anti-religious parable about rejecting God — though a
fleeting climactic prayer to the real God offered on Truman’s behalf suggests that the target is not God, but his presumptuous imitators.